Cloud Computing Blog

Jamal Mazhar

Jamal Mazhar is Founder & CEO of Kaavo. He possesses more than 15 years of experience in technology, engineering and consulting with a range of Fortune 500 companies including GE and ING. He established ING’s “Center of Excellence for B2B” which streamlined $2 billion per month in electronic money transfer operations. As Lead Architect at GE Capital e-Business team, Jamal directed analysis and implementation efforts and improved the performance of the website generating more than $1 billion in annual lease revenues. At Trilogy he provided technical and managerial expertise for several large scale e-business implementation projects for companies such as Boeing, NCR, Gartner, British Airways, Quantas Airways and Alltel. Jamal has BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.

OpenStack started with the primary objective to provide an open standard cloud computing platform and prevent vendor lock. It has been almost three years since the launch of OpenStack. During this time almost all major companies in the cloud computing space baring Amazon ...

Use of cloud for DR solutions is becoming more common, even the organizations which are not using cloud for mission critical production applications are moving towards using cloud for application DR.
Faster Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Typically DR requires lengthy manual processes ...

Sam Charrington recently posted a nice article called The Disintegration of PaaS. In it, he describes how early PaaS providers (PaaS 1.0) locked developers into their stacks and essentially prevented the movement of these apps onto other PaaS platforms. Sam also describes th...

It is interesting to follow Oracle’s journey to the Cloud, starting in 2008 with Larry Ellison's rant about “What the hell is Cloud Computing?” to Oracle’s effort to sell servers as “Cloud in a Box” aka Exalogic Elastic Cloud in 2010. Finally w...

Running cloud applications is the end-game; acquiring cloud servers is only the beginningIn Part I, I talked about how it is important to think about cloud use from the application’s point of view. We need to digitally centralize our best-practice institutional knowledge so...

It is amazing how I continue to hear people talk about how they are still not familiar with “cloud”, what it is and how it will help their specific business. Just the other day I spoke to a customer prospect who believed they had a private cloud – as it turns out they...

Several popular websites and companies were impacted by the recent Amazon cloud outage. It was quite surprising to see that so many of the companies had no backup plans to restore their applications at an alternate location. Just because we are using cloud doesn’t mea...

Today I received an email from Amazon announcing their AWS CloudFormation Service. Basically to automate the deployment of complex applications or workloads Amazon is allowing users to capture all the deployment information in one template. They call the template “Sta...

This past week, Oracle announced that it will be fully supporting and certifying a range of its software products including E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, Siebel CRM, Fusion Middleware, etc. on Amazon EC2. This is a huge win for Amazon and a very big win and validation ...

As we are in the early stages of the transformation offered by cloud computing, there is lot of confusion around how various solutions and offerings fit in the overall picture for enterprise customers and the benefits of various offerings. Whether you have to deliver SaaS, PaaS, ...

Lately there have been several discussions around cloud API standards, and I am failing to understand why it is a big deal. Lets first identify two type of standards.
For cloud lot of attention is given to syntax standards, e.g. using same method signatures. E.g. some IaaS enablers ...

To optimally use the cloud and to effectively manage the service levels of applications we need two things:1) On-demand configuration: Without cloud it used to take us several days to procure infrastructure resources so it was acceptable to spend couple of days configuring servers and ...

At Kaavo we recognized that there is a need to provide a horizontal framework that anyone can use to quickly build a vertical solution for running and managing their complex custom applications in the cloud. To enable single click deployment and runtime management of any custom applica...

One of our customers wanted to establish a site to site connectivity between their datacenter and public cloud (Amazon EC2) and then have a private network within Amazon EC2 with their own custom IP addresses for their servers in the cloud. Basically idea here is to augment...

Amazon took the lead in addressing one of key objections of enterprise customers to cloud adoption by announcing the Virtual Private Cloud today. Jeff Barr at AWS has done a great job in explaining the technical details of the solution. The solution goes a long way in addre...

Lately there were some blogs implying that businesses should pick Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) over Software as a Service (SaaS) as SaaS has higher vendor lock compared to IaaS. There has been a lot of buzz around the three flavors of cloud computing, SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.&...

University of Berkley has published an excellent paper on cloud computing, the argument regarding data security in the cloud is that encrypted data in the cloud can be more secure than unencrypted data in the internal datacenter. Almost nobody uses encryption in internal datacent...

Thanks to the hard work of all the team members, our launch last week went really well and was very well received by the enterprise IT folks, and the analysts and journalists covering the enterprise IT space. Especially, our application centric approach and secure persistence of ...

In reference to my earlier blog on Application Centric Management, there is a discussion on the cloud computing group , I posted a detailed response, sharing it here:When we say we need application centric approach it is implied that it is needed from application owner perspective, peo...

Amazon recently announced the EC2 availability in Europe; this is a big announcement and Amazon is going to compete directly with Flexiscale in the European market. Prior to this announcement, Amazon was only offering S3 storage services in Europe. This will give additional...

Recently I read an article by Greg Ness. A quote from the article, "The virtualization players will be forced to build or acquire application layer and connectivity intelligence as a means of survival." I couldn’t agree more as the dynamic nature of infrastr...

Enterprise IT teams spend a significant amount of time in handling configuration management issues and resolving conflicts and testing applications & server configurations whenever patches are applied to servers or OS or any changes are made to applications or the middleware softwa...

There are discussions around whether large enterprises will build private clouds or will there be a fundamental shift of computing power from private data-centers to large datacenters “public” clouds.Fundamentally this is about specialization of skills and economies of scal...

Google has recently announced the Google App Engine platform and there have been several discussions on the internet comparing Google’s offering with Amazon’s EC2 service. The service provided by Google is different than Amazon; Google is not providing the raw computi...

First of all we want to update on the release of IMOD (Infrastructure & Middleware On Demand) application. Next week we will be going live with the limited beta. CIO magazine recently published an article about Cloud Computing, overall it is a good article and worth reading....

This is couple of months old announcement some how I missed it and learned about this recently. Wipro has also announced that they are going to enter in the cloud computing market. Apparently Wipro is planning on offer two options, one is the offering of onsite datacen...

Last week at Kaavo we were fortunate enough to attend the value studio organized by Thornton A. May of the IT Leadership Academy. Value Studio is an invitation only event attended by about 40 top IT executives. Unlike large conferences, the way event is organized gives oppo...

This week there has been media frenzy about the coverage of cloud computing/utility computing. First there was an article in Financial Times, and then someone pointed out to me the article in USA Today discussing Nicholas Carr's book Big Switch. An interesting quote from th...

Looks like we picked the right area to focus on by developing IMOD application to make it easier to use cloud computing resources. Here is futher validation that large data center (cloud computing) is the way of the future. Here is recent excerpt from fi...

Recently Ian Foster, father of grid computing, provided a very clear and simple explanation of cloud vs. grid computing. In his blog http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/theres-grid-in.html he explained cloud vs. grids and how the industry has evolved and will continue...

Utility computing (also known as on demand computing) is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a physical public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network). This system has the advantage of a ...